Originally the game featured only male dwarfs as the playable race. The female characters, available with the Sisters in Arms DLC, are equivalent in everything: A.I., behaviour, carring capacity, tasks assignments and skill progression. They only differ in visual appearance, in voice timbre and in few attributes, like health, base armor and speed (walking, running, jumping, climbing and swimming).

The hard-working dwarves will be joined by their charming sisters in arms. Female dwarves have a little less health than their male counterparts, but their movement speed is significantly higher. They will defend the shelter and explore the dungeons along with the male dwarves.

The player begins each new world with only one dwarf. As he/she levels up, one new dwarf will spawn, always at the stockpile — one dwarf per level. The maximum number of them being 20, as this is currently the maximum reachable level in the game.

If a dwarf eat 3 times in a row the same food, there is no other kind of food served and he/she have less than 2, he/she will state:

X?! I can't eat this anymore!

Being "X" the food eaten 3 times. This dwarf will have to eat at least 1 time another nutriment before he/she can eat that food again. So, there is no need to have a huge variety on the table. If the player can serve at least 2 kinds of food, there will be no monotony problem.

All dwarfs with more than 7 satiety points receive a health regeneration bonus of 1 health point each 5 minutes[8]. So, if food with healing properties — like apples (growing only in the forest world) — are hard to get, it's still possible to heal the dwarfs by keeping them well fed.

If a dwarf dies, all his equipment will fall on the ground and another dwarf must carry it back to the stockpile in order to be used again. If he/she dies and his/her body fall into the lava or in the ocean at the map extremeties, all the equipment will be lost.

Dwarf died

When a dwarf dies, this sign appears on the left side of the screen. Clicking on this icon will show where his/her body lays down, along with the dropped equipment.

In a Permanent Death mode game, if a dwarf dies, it's lost forever, there will be no replacement. In this mode, each dead dwarf is 1 less to the population cap. So, if the player has lost 3 dwarfs, e.g., and get to the maximum level (20), he/she will have only 17 dwarfs available.

Dwarves can be controlled allowing you to manually move him, place and mine blocks etc. This is done by selecting a dwarf and clicking the direct control button.

When controlling a dwarf you can:

Manually move the dwarf.

Dwarves seem to get a slight speed boost when being controlled directly (untested but 50% movement speed increase according to files).

Place and mine blocks.

Dwarves gain a mine and place range increase. This means dwarves can mine and place blocks up to two blocks from his location.

It is unknown if this is a bug or not, but when controlling a dwarf you can place any block without the dwarf having to get it from the Stockpile. This is useful for when building things far away, or when building big projects.

Currently (patch 1.0.008) you can instantly mine any block (not all blocks tested). This is done by having the dwarf start mining a block, then cancelling and immediately start mining the same block again.

Attack enemies.

Currently, dwarves will not run to the target if you click to attack it. You will have to manually do this.

Eat and sleep.

Use portals

You can jump through a portal while on it by pressing W. If there are multiple active portals, press W again, until you portal to the one you want.

For the complete list of skills, skill items and skill books, see the main article: Skill.

Each dwarf starts with one random skill at level 10, which can be improved by doing their related activities and using skill books up to 100 points. Skill items will accelerate this process and overcome the 100 limit. Each dwarf can develop a maximum of 3 different skills.

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